The FinnAPL meeting this year is hosted just outside Helsinki in Hämeenkylä Manor. Arriving at the manor the night before I couldn’t appreciate the beautiful setting until I woke up this morning to a snow covered landscape all around from my room’s view. The seminar was formally opened by Veli-Matti Jantunen who welcomed us all before diving straight into the … Read More
Dyalog ’17 Elsinore – Day 4
Dyalog ’17 Day 4 – Thursday September 14th 2017 Dyalog does a great job of filling their user meetings with interesting presentations, and this year was no different. Personally, I find that the challenge then becomes for the attendees to soak in as much as possible without getting overwhelmed by the ocean of information: new features in the language old features … Read More
Konga – IP communication on k vs Dyalog APL’s Conga
Dyalog APL introduced their new communication toolbox Conga a few years back. This week they are presenting the latest (upcoming) version 3.0 in the annual Dyalog user meeting (this year in Glasgow), which promises enhanced features such as built in http and websocket support. I got my hands on an early build with the aim of testing the new features … Read More
APL sounds good – Part 2: Transformers
One thing that I find really interesting and impressive about the APL language is the way it transforms traditional programming language into a succinct notation. Take for example the typical mean calculation. In traditional languages: total = 0 for i in x total = total + x mean = total / length of x and in APL: mean←(+/÷≢)x The APL … Read More
APL sounds good – Part 1
My first hobby code project in APL was signal processing tools. It was something I had studied in university and felt like a good candidate for APL programming. When I saw a question about sound in APL in the Dyalog forum recently, it rekindled my interest and I decided to explore the domain again, 10 years later. The question posed … Read More
AA – Abbreviations and Acronyms
Abbreviations and acronyms are great when you want to save space (or typing). There exists a plethora of commonly used abbreviations in most languages and most people recognise and read them without any problems. But how do you best shorten a new name or phrase? The Problem We have a collection of drug descriptions, typically not more than a dozen … Read More
The skirting board problem – Solved
This problem looks deceptively simple at first glance, but in the science of optimisation it is actually considered a hard problem to solve as the time to calculate a solution increases exponentially with the size of the problem. Ignoring that I focused on coding an algorithm to find the solution for the given input. After some considerable thought and experimentation … Read More
What is Lagom?
I often repeat a quote that I remember from my apprentice days that goes: 90% of the development work is done in 10% of the time, the last 90% of the time accounts for the remaining 10% of code. Today I found a similar one (that makes me think I remembered it wrong): The first 90 percent of the code … Read More